Making House Calls With Elisabeth Weiss, New York’s Most Musical Dog Trainer

“Wow! Good girl!” Elisabeth Weiss chirps in a voice higher than Olive Oyl’s after inhaling helium. She’s talking to her first client of the day, an 11-year-old black-and-white Border collie named Oreo. They lock eyes, Weiss waves her hand, and Oreo springs up onto two air-filled stability balls—a shaky balancing act on all four paws. It’s a rehab exercise to strengthen the ACL and medial meniscus Oreo tore in her left hind leg last November. Another wave of Weiss’s hand and Oreo is back on the floor. “C’mon, cookie! C’mon, cooks! Let’s go!” Up and down, up and down Oreo climbs, struggling but determined, transfixed by Weiss’s spell of encouragement—and the nuggets of freeze-dried beef tripe she’s holding. “She knows she’s doing well!” says Weiss, whose talents bring her entrée into the homes of a certain set of New York’s moneyed canine owners. “She’s such a bravedog!”

Weiss uses her normal voice when speaking to humans, though a few minutes in her presence will make anyone start talking like a cartoon. Even Lou Reed, for whom she trained two dogs, would try to imitate her dog voice, “which was hilarious,” she says. Today’s first house call takes place in the living room of a Midtown West apartment, where Oreo’s psychiatrist owner, a divorcé, keeps his extensive Star Warscollection.

A slender blonde with purple streaks in her hair, Weiss wears a brown-and-black patterned bubble dress with bottomless pockets carrying lavender-scented poop bags. Underneath that, she’s got on a trainer’s trick for additional protection, pastel floral pants. Among her many necklaces is a brass pendant embossed with the outline of a bone in memory of Wittgy, a wire-haired dachshund she once loved and lost, named after the philosopherWittgenstein.

A former professional violinist from Vienna, Weiss got into dog training accidentally, through owning dogs, including an Irish wolfhound named Salome (after the Strauss opera), whose size, beauty, and manners had made her a bit of a neighborhood celebrity along the walking paths of the West Village. She met Reed and his wife, Laurie Anderson, her first professional clients, through their downstairs neighbor in July 2010, when their beloved rat terrier, Lolabelle, was dying of pancreatic cancer. “She was just lying there,” says Weiss, “and I think everybody wasdepressed.”

Weiss believes dogs find music soothing and has trained her own briards, Cosi and Petzi, to play piano with their paws and noses. (This practice is based on the philosophy that teaching dogs to touch things builds self-confidence.) The hope was that if Lolabelle could learn to do the same in her moribund state, it might produce endorphins and give her “a passion of sorts,” says Weiss. The first day Weiss came over, she lured Lolabelle to one of the 20 or so keyboards Anderson had lying around the apartment, and the results were so thrilling Reed asked Weiss to come back every day. “I didn’t know who Lou Reed was,” she says. “I only care about thedog.”

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Melodic precision is a little much to ask from dogs, but Lolabelle had great rhythm. Soon she’d learned to ring a bell and knock castanets, all while sitting at the keys. “She was a whole one-dog band,” says Weiss. Even when Lolabelle went blind and was placed on oxygen, Weiss says, “she would drag herself to the piano, and she would still want to play.” Lolabelle died around Easter 2011, having lasted more than a year longer than her prognosis. Reed and Anderson gave her a Buddhistfuneral.

It was at Reed’s 70th birthday party, in 2012, that he started talking to Weiss about getting another dog. She found them Will, a Border terrier; Reed liked to refer to the dog as “my son.” When he and Anderson wanted to fly with the puppy onboard with them, Weiss had Will registered as Reed’s emotional-supportanimal.

It was through Reed and Anderson that Weiss wound up house-training Jann Wenner’s wheaten terrier, Max, for a few months. (She charges $350 for an initial consultation and $150 to $200 for sessions of about an hour.) Anderson also referred her to Vito Schnabel, whose bulldog Albert was afraid to go outside. (“I plastered 11th Street with roast beef for him,” says Weiss.) The last time she saw Reed, Julian Schnabel, who lived across the street, was visiting, and Reed scolded Schnabel about the out-of-control Rhodesian Ridgeback–bloodhound mix, Buddy, he’d just adopted from a shelter. “Lou said, ‘You’ve got to train it. That dog is dangerous.’ ” The next day Weiss went to Julian’s, and a couple of weeks later Reed died of liver disease. Weiss stood onstage at Reed’s Apollo Theater memorial with Will (“He went nuts when John Zorn started playing”). Now two years old, Will is a master of tricks. He can do “hot dog,” where he rolls himself in a blanket, and “Get me a cold one!,” where he fetches a drink from the fridge. He doesn’t play keyboard—music may forever belong to Lolabelle in the Anderson household—but Weiss is trying to teach him how toskateboard.

“Have you ever seen the Redford movie The Horse Whisperer? That’s Elisabeth,” says Myrna Gershon, whose Tibetan terrier, Buddy, is another client today. “She has the patience of Job; she has a biblical gift,” says Myrna’s husband, Freddie. They found Weiss through Myrna’s tai chi instructor, who’d also worked with Reed and had raved about what Weiss had done for Lolabelle and Will. (Almost all of Weiss’s clientele has come through word of mouth.) Freddie is co-owner of a licensing company that manages the rights to every Disney stage production and Stephen Sondheim musical, as well as Annie, Fiddler on the Roof, and Les Misérables; Myrna came up with the idea for Flintstones vitamins. Weiss goes over to their Upper East Side apartment every day to work with Buddy (a popular dog name among the one percent, apparently), who was so “ornery” when they first got him, according to Myrna, that Weiss had to move in for a week and put him through bootcamp.

But it was hardly militaristic: Weiss has developed her own style of what’s known in the community as “positive reinforcement training,” which means she never uses “No!,” or what’s known as “compulsion training.” (“You don’t talk to somebody you like like that,” she says.) It worked on Buddy; he now has regular playdates with Sondheim’s standard poodles. He’s been doing keyboard for only a month but has the unique skill of being able to cross his paws. Soon, “he’ll be doing Liberace numbers!” Weiss says. “You think he can get a job at a pianobar?”

*This article appears in the July 28, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

As we anticipate the end of Mueller, signs of a wind-down:-SCO prosecutors bringing family into the office for visits-Staff carrying out boxes-Manafort sentenced, top prosecutor leaving-office of 16 attys down to 10-DC US Atty stepping up in cases-grand jury not seen in 2mo

For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them. Now, in the wake of the two deadly crashes involving the same jet model, Boeing will make one of those safety features standard as part of a fix to get the planes in the air again.

… Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy.

Attorneys for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and more than a dozen other defendants charged in a Florida prostitution sting filed a motion to stop the public release of surveillance videos and other evidence taken by police.

Attorneys filed the motion Wednesday in Palm Beach County court. The State of Florida does not agree with the request, according to the filing.

In the motion, the attorneys asked the court to grant a protective order to safeguard the confidentiality of the materials seized from the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, and “in particular the videos, until further order of the court.”

Two years in, White House aides are dismayed to discover the president likes lobbing pointless, nasty attacks at people like George Conway and John McCain

But the saga has left even White House aides accustomed to a president who bucks convention feeling uncomfortable. While the controversies may have pushed aside some bad news, they also trampled on Trump’s Wednesday visit to an army tank manufacturing plant in swing state Ohio.

“For the most part, most people internally don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole,” said one former senior White House official. A current senior White House official said White House aides are making an effort “not to discuss it in polite company.” Another current White House official bemoaned the tawdry distraction. “It does not appear to be a great use of our time to talk about George Conway or dead John McCain. … Why are we doing this?

When Mr. Trump was running for president, he promised to personally stop American companies from shutting down factories and moving plants abroad, warning that he would punish them with public backlash and higher taxes. Many companies scrambled to respond to his Twitter attacks, announcing jobs and investments in the United States — several of which never materialized.

But despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to compel companies to build and hire, they appear to be increasingly prioritizing their balance sheets over political backlash.

“I don’t think there’s as much fear,” said Gene Grabowski, who specializes in crisis communications for the public relations firm Kglobal. “At first it was a shock to the system, but now we’ve all adjusted. We take it in stride, and I think that’s what the business community is doing.”

There’s no specific stipulation that Milo must be heard, so it could be worse

President Trump is expected to issue an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to tie research and education grants made to colleges and universities to more aggressive enforcement of the First Amendment, according to a draft of the order viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The order instructs agencies including the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Defense to ensure that public educational institutions comply with the First Amendment, and that private institutions live up to their own stated free-speech standards.

The order falls short of what some university officials feared would be more sweeping or specific measures; it doesn’t prescribe any specific penalty that would result in schools losing research or other education grants as a result of specific policies.

Tech companies say that it is easier to identify content related to known foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al Qaeda because of information-sharing with law enforcement and industry-wide efforts, such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a group formed by YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter in 2017.

On Monday, for example, YouTube said on its Twitter account that it was harder for the company to stop the video of the shootings in Christchurch than to remove copyrighted content or ISIS-related content because YouTube’s tools for content moderation rely on “reference files to work effectively.” Movie studios and record labels provide reference files in advance and, “many violent extremist groups, like ISIS, use common footage and imagery,” YouTube wrote.

The cycle is self-reinforcing: The companies collect more data on what ISIS content looks like based on law enforcement’s myopic and under-inclusive views, and then this skewed data is fed to surveillance systems, Bloch-Wehba says. Meanwhile, consumers don’t have enough visibility in the process to know whether these tools are proportionate to the threat, whether they filter too much content, or whether they discriminate against certain groups, she says.

Two mystery litigants citing privacy concerns are making a last-ditch bid to keep secret some details in a lawsuit stemming from wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s history of paying underage girls for sex.

Just prior to a court-imposed deadline Tuesday, two anonymous individuals surfaced to object to the unsealing of a key lower-court ruling in the case, as well as various submissions by the parties.

Both people filed their complaints in the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which is overseeing the case. The two people said they could face unwarranted speculation and embarrassment if the court makes public records from the suit, in which Virginia Giuffre, an alleged Epstein victim, accused longtime Epstein friend Ghislaine Maxwell of engaging in sex trafficking by facilitating his sexual encounters with teenage girls. Maxwell has denied the charges.

Rescue teams in Mozambique are struggling to reach the thousands of people stranded on roofs and in trees and urgently need more helicopters and boats as post-cyclone flood waters continue to rise.

Rescue workers, military personnel and volunteers are rushing to save thousands of Mozambicans before flood levels rise further, but with four helicopters, a handful of boats and extremely difficult conditions, have only been able to save about 413 so far.

“I don’t even know if we’ve made a dent. There are just so many people. The scale is huge. We’re busy doing the best we can,” said Travis Trower from Rescue South Africa, adding that a lot of people had been washed away but those still alive, whom he had seen from helicopter flights, were in a very bad state.

More than 400 sq kilometres (150 sq miles) in the region are flooded, according to satellite images taken by the EU, and in some places the water is six metres (19ft) deep. At least 600,000 people are affected, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), ranging from those whose lives are in immediate danger to those who need other kinds of aid.

About 40 percent of the District’s lower-income neighborhoods experienced gentrification between 2000 and 2013, giving the city the greatest “intensity of gentrification” of any in the country, according to a studyreleased Tuesday by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

The District also saw the most African American residents — more than 20,000 — displaced from their neighborhoods during that time, mostly by affluent, white newcomers, researchers said. The District and Philadelphia were most “notable” for displacements of black residents, while Denver and Austin had the most Hispanic residents move. Nationwide, nearly 111,000 African Americans and more than 24,000 Hispanics moved out of gentrifying neighborhoods, the study found.

In an essay accompanying the study, Sabiyha Prince of Empower DC said the city “rolled out the proverbial red carpet” for tens of thousands of new residents in the past five years. But the new dog parks, bike lanes, condominiums and pricey restaurants that followed, she said, are not viewed as improvements by long-term residents, who can feel isolated because of losing neighbors, social networks and local businesses. Prince, an anthropologist, said longtime Washingtonians tell stories of “alienation and vulnerability in the nation’s capital.”